Vehicles are increasingly being outfitted with head-up displays (HUD) at the factory. As HUDs become more widely utilized and as active safety technologies become more broadly deployed in vehicles, many automotive manufacturers and drivers will find that HUD implementations increase driver situational awareness and present active vehicle safety technologies, including adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance, night vision, lane departure warning and blind spot detection with greater efficacy. Additionally, as HUDs become more widely utilized, many users will chose to use an after-market HUD implementation in vehicles that did not include a HUD installed at the factory. To make a HUD, it is common to place a light emitting image plane parallel to the dashboard such that the emitted light reflects off the windshield and into the viewer's eye. This light emitting image can be made from traditional flat panels such as liquid-crystal displays (LCD), light emitting diode based displays (LED), or organic light emitting diode (OLED) based displays, or alternatively from projection technologies such as scanned laser beam displays, digital light processing (DLP) displays, or liquid-crystal display (LCD) microdisplays. Such display approaches typically require a device size that relates to the image size desired for the HUD so that in order to create a HUD having a larger field of view (FOV), larger sized displays and/or bulky optics are needed to achieve the desired magnification. However, space is typically at a premium in vehicles, and there is often not enough room in the vehicle for larger sized displays or optics.
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